LaCie 5big NAS Pro Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Performance

Simple, easy, efficient: It sounds like a bunch of buzzword bingo, but that’s exactly what LaCie has crafted in its 5big NAS Pro storage device. While we do wish the name was something a bit catchier (LaCie’s “2big” model has all the cachet, that way), we love the fact that this piece of network-attached storage looks a prop pulled straight from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a bit of a combination of a monolith and everyone’s favorite dulcet-toned computer.

We’d be willing to pay almost any price for this network-attached-storage (NAS) box if the giant, glowing-blue “orb” of sorts on the front were instead red and, when touched, offered you a sassy comment about how it “Just can’t do that, Dave.” [Said by someone whose name actually is “Dave.” —Ed.] We digress; most NAS drives don’t make for great office decor, but the 5big NAS Pro doesn’t look like a NAS box in the slightest. We like the fact that there are no LCD screens, drive bays, or other obstructions adorning the device’s front. It’s Apple-like in its simplicity: One big button turns the device on, and that same button, when pressed, turns it off.

And we do get our wish in the long run—sort of. That prominent button does, in fact, glow red, based on the various status messages it’s trying to impart to the device owner. Alternating blue and red means that the device’s RAID is synchronizing; blinking red means that it’s degraded (ruh-roh); solid red means that your entire RAID array has failed and all of your data is gone. HAL would be proud.

We’ll get more into the design in a bit; the front LED is arguably the NAS box’s front-and-center feature, worth at least a bit of a mention right off. What’s hidden underneath is equally admirable, but that’s the part that is going to cost you all the money.

The 5big NAS Pro ships either as a diskless box ($529), or one that’s been prepopulated. Your prepopulated choices are a configuration with five 2-terabyte (2TB) drives ($1,199) or five 4TB drives ($2,099). If you opt for a drives-included version of the device, you’ll enjoy fine file performance (as soon as the ink dries on the IOU you had to acquire first to buy it). We have to warn you up front, though: The 5big NAS Pro’s feature list feels a smidge sparse for its price.

That said, there’s a certain method to LaCie’s madness: You’re paying for that simplicity, be it in the device’s design, its user interface, or its features. While that makes us hesitant to recommend this NAS box for enthusiasts, who can get the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink list of features they crave in certain other NAS devices, there’s something to be said for a device that meets the needs and experience levels of the less network-savvy. So long as you can stomach the price, the 5big NAS Pro might offer just enough functionality—sans headache—for everything you’re trying to do. And boy, is it speedy.

Design & Performance

This LaCie “cube” is really a near-cube, measuing 7.75x7x8.75 inches. Empty, it weighs roughly 10.5 pounds, and when packed with five hard drives, that jumps to just shy of 17 pounds.

As we alluded in the introduction, we love the design. Here’s a device that could theoretically fit perfectly on your bookshelf without uglying up the place. If you've owned almost any NAS drive, you know what we’re talking about. So many NAS boxes that we’ve taken a look at use the same formula in their construction: Ugly drive bays with ugly handles covering the front of the chassis, some tiny blinking lights, perhaps a crude strip of a screen that blasts an IP address for all to see.

LaCie’s big gray box does have that honkin’ blue button on the front for its only bit of flair. Otherwise, we love the drab-yet-modern aesthetic. The light tells you all you need to know, and, should it prove to be an annoyance—perhaps you’re a nightsleeper who doesn’t really want that big, blue glow from the desk in your bedroom—you can turn it off via the NAS box’s settings menu.

That said, we applaud LaCie for setting up the NAS, by default, to display a red light when something’s wrong, regardless of whether you’ve turned off the ever-staring eye of the blue light. It’s the best of both worlds: You get a visual signal of a problem, should your NAS box go into red-alert mode, but you can otherwise suppress it.

The rear of the box is home to four USB ports, split into two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 connections…

Using these, you can attach extra storage to the device and access it via the NAS box’s file architecture in Windows or Mac OS X. Like most NAS boxes, you can also use one of those USB ports for printer sharing, if you so desire. It’s mildly annoying to have no USB ports on the front of the chassis, but, again, this sacrifice is made for the device’s aesthetic, not usability.

There’s no eSATA port on the rear of the 5big NAS Pro; only the company’s two-bay 2big NAS variant gets that, as well as a single USB 2.0 port. Given the price of this larger cousin, we were hoping to see a bit more connectivity on the rear—we’d gladly trade one of the two extra Gigabit LAN ports for more-comprehensive storage connectivity, given how rare it is that one uses both Ethernet connections in a normal home environment. (See also: The 5big NAS Pro’s VGA port, which can be used during the NAS recovery process should you find your device having some kind of horrific technical problem. We get the functionality, but as home users, we don’t even have a VGA-friendly monitor at hand.)

The 5big NAS Pro’s rear is where you’ll also find its five drive trays...

They’re fairly easy to manipulate so long as you have a coin on hand. All come locked by default, and you have to manipulate a tiny slot-lock (that’s where the coin helps) to access each drive tray the first time. We’re not sure of the need for the extra locking mechanism versus what one conventionally finds on most NAS boxes, but there you have it. Once the trays are unlocked, each is easy to pull out without much effort...

With the prepopulated versions of the 5big, four screws hold each drive in place in its tray, and removing the screws voids your warranty.

Performance

We were quite impressed with the performance of the 5big NAS Pro on our assortment of file transfer tests. It took 2 minutes and 16 seconds (2:16) to transfer our test folder—1,700 files, totaling 10GB—from our test PC to LaCie’s device, and just 3 seconds less (2:13) to go the other way. A single, 7.67GB file (which was, incidentally, a zipped version of our 10GB folder) transferred over to the 5big NAS Pro in 1:16, shaving a single second off the return trip. A quick batch of 163 mostly-MP3 files, totaling 2GB, made it over and back in an average of 23 seconds each way.

To put those times in more useful terms, we saw performance from 75MB to 105MB per second on our tests, depending on what, exactly, was being transferred (and in which direction). We haven't tested many NAS boxes of this pay grade to give an apples-to-apples comparison of these figures, given that we just recently switched over to this new series of benchmark tests. But it’s pretty clear that LaCie’s device outperforms some of the top-rated single-drive NAS devices we’ve checked out recently: Western Digital’s My Cloud, the Seagate Central, and the Synology-based ioSafe N2. Simply put, the 5big NAS Pro is pretty speedy, transfer-wise.